Color gradient Changed color gradient to be more colorblind and b&w printer friendly.

Statistics Table

Non-viable organism data Non-viable avidians have an energy acquisiton rate, but their offspring cost and fitness are now properly left undefined.

Population Averages are calculated only on viable avidians.

Viable organisms Number of viable organisms in the population is listed.

Ancestors Number of ancestors used to start population run is now listed.

Use of resources Displays the number of avidians that can do all the picked set of resources.

Mini Graph

New charting options Number of viable avidians.

Zoom Click-drag to zoom in on a portion of the graph (and double-click to go back to full view).

Data point display Displays update and value based on cursor position.

Functions-performed line Green line indicates number of avidans that perform all highlighted functions (i.e. selected in function pane).

Viable organisms Option to show number of viable organisms or total number.

Organism Viewer

Mutations are indicated by black rather than green circles to make them easier to see.

Instruction number Clicking on an instruction dot in the genome will display/undisplay its number (i.e., numbered from the 3 o’clock start position).

Bit bars now have vertical lines every 4 bits and colors changed to increase visibility.

Instruction detail area size Can adjust areas of page to make the instruction detail display bigger so all of the text can be seen at one time.

Analysis Viewer

Data point display Displays update and show point values based on cursor position.

Zoom and pan Click Zoom icon, then click-drag to zoom in on a portion of the graph. Click Pan icon, then click-drag to pan. Click Autoscale icon to go back to full view.

• 3.0 BETA (web) released 2016 June 18

A beta version of the next major version of Avida-ED was released June 18, 2016 at the national Evolution 2016 conference. The new version works across all major operating systems by running in the browser.

Visit the Avida-ED 3.0 BETA release accesspage, which has a link to the application served from our site, and also installer packages for both MacOS and Windows. The platform-specific installers set up a local web server on your machine and launch an instance of Avida-ED Web 3.0 in your default browser.

• 2.0.41 (Mac) released January 2014.

This is the Golden Release version.

Population Viewer
• Fixed a bug which caused populations running in Demo mode to fail to replay exactly.

• 2.0 BETA (Mac)
February 2013.

This was mostly a major "under the hood" revision that provides a flexible and powerful foundation for future feature enhancements, but there are some changes that will provide immediate benefits. Major code optimizations make everything run faster with larger world sizes. The speed increase also allowed us to replace the previous pre-evolved ancestor organism with the standard simple replicator ancestor used in the research version of Avida. Following are some of the other noticable improvements and changes in Avida-ED 2.0:

Population Viewer
• Drag and drop organism from Petri dish onto Organism viewer icon to open its genome directly in the organism viewer.

• Drag and drop Petri dish population icon onto Analysis viewer icon to open the current population directly in the analysis viewer.
• New animation flips the Petri dish over to show its environmental setup controls.
• New “Stats” button in Population viewer hides or reveals statistics boxes.
• Word labeled control buttons replace video icon button controls .
• Added “New” control button under Petri dish to start a new experiment.
• Fixed font display problem on mini-graph axes.

General
• Code optimizations significantly increased the run speed.
• Increased default world size to 60×60 (from 30×30).
• New ancestor organism (simple replicator).
• New Populated Dish example – evolved to 5000 updates.
• Added a “Freezer” menu item for redundant controls to save items to the freezer.
• Simplified the File controls for exporting data .
• Simplified the File controls for saving graphics in different formats, allowing more control of what is exported.

• 1.2.0 (Mac & PC)
September 2011.

Mac
• Updated OS X version to work with 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion).
• Fixed font display problem in Population mini-graph and Analysis graph.PC
• Updated PC version to work with Windows 7.

• Multidish BETA (Mac) released Spring 2010.

Mac
• Experimental "Multi-dish" version of Avida-ED released that allows multiple dishes with different environmental settings to be stitched together.

• 1.0.1 (Mac) released 2 November 2007.

Mac
• Updated OS X version to run natively on new Intel Macs.

• 1.0 (Mac & PC) released 19 June 2007.

Avida-ED was officially released for public distribution at the Society for the Study of Evolution meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Mac
• OS X v. 10.4 (Tiger)

PC
• Windows XP

Page updated 2017/12/02

Avida-ED is an award-winning educational application developed at Michigan State University for undergraduate biology courses to help students learn about evolution and scientific method by allowing them to design and perform experiments to test hypotheses about evolutionary mechanisms using evolving digital organisms.